BENGALURU: Taking a cue from the recent Uttar Pradesh election, BJP Karnataka IT cell has created 7,000 WhatsApp groups targeting individual voters. It plans to create at least 10,000 groups in the coming days.
Following BJP national president Amit Shah’s recent visit to Karnataka, the party state unit’s IT cell created a WhatsApp group of some volunteers. These volunteers, in turn, created more such groups and messages sent from the IT cell are forwarded to the numerous groups.
The messages include the Prime Minister’s speeches, audio clips of BJP leaders, information on the pro-people initiatives of the Union government, anti-people moves of the Siddaramaiah government, etc. The party hopes to reach out to a vast number of people and mould public opinion.
Speaking to Express, Balaji Srinivas, state convener of the BJP social media cell, said as of now they have 7,000 WhatsApp groups for this purpose. “This worked well in the Uttar Pradesh elections. The same strategy is being used in the Gujarat assembly election. Basically, we want more people to know about the party and government initiatives,’’ he said.
Balaji said they have a central team which posts personalised messages and these are shared with the other groups by the volunteers. “We want to have at least 10,000 groups or even more,” he said. To a question on the number of participants in each group, he said WhatsApp allows a maximum of 250 people in a group. Even if there are 200 members, 1.4 lakh people can be reached, he said.
Political scientist Prof Sandeep Shastri said this is part of BJP’s strategy to have multiple levels of public outreach. Connecting with people through WhatsApp has great potential and the party can reach out to the tech-savvy sections of society, he felt.